I
well remember how Chaudhri Charan Singh, who had briefly been India’s
Prime Minister in the late 1970s, and entertained high hopes of
winning the 1980 elections too, reacted when he found that his party
and its allies had been routed at the polls by Indira Gandhi’s
Congress. "Maro goli", he pronounced.

A handy Hindi
expression to show shocked disbelief and meaning, roughly, "Shoot
the lot!"

Charan Singh, old and
ailing himself, certainly had no intention of shooting any of his
political opponents.

Those who were in the
vicinity could only have shaken their heads in sympathy and
understanding — after all, it was no more than a yelp of dismay from
a loser. Not a declaration of intent. Even Charan Singh’s
adversaries would not have felt threatened that he was going to come
after them with a loaded rifle.

Now, after September
11, 2001 and the shattering of the World Trade Center, even a
throwaway remark such as this might land one in trouble with the
police.

Lest I am charged of scaremongering, I
cite an actual case. Can there be a more respectable and harmless
occupation than that of a maestro? A music conductor? People like
Zubin Mehta and Andre Previn who put on formal evening attire and
orchestrate bands with their batons? Well, a quite well-known
conductor, a Frenchman called Pierre Boules, aged 75, had gone to
Switzerland in the course of his work. On a cold morning early this
December, he was woken up in his hotel room by the Swiss police and
arrested as being a terrorist. The evidence was that, in the 1960s,
when he was a much younger man he was heard to have remarked that
Opera Houses should be blown up.

Luckily, the
misunderstanding was soon cleared. The police seemed satisfied that
Boules had not come with sticks of RDX or dynamite in his handbag to
blow up the local Opera Theatre.

The incident just
shows that we have all become excessively cautious about the threat
posed by terrorists. Sure there are false scares such as the one in
Switzerland. But then the extra vigilance that is now become routine
in most countries has also discovered potential terrorists who have
been just waiting for a chance to strike.

Here are two actual
cases which bring out the point I wish to make. That before September
11, even the most bizarre activities of individuals were not subjected
to police scrutiny for fear of overstepping the bounds of civil
rights. After that date, nothing out of the ordinary escapes police
vigilance.

The American police
have worked out a ‘racial profile’ of the typical terrorist, and
have circulated it to police organisations of all countries likely to
form terrorist targets. Any foreigner who conforms to the profile is
kept under surveillance. That was how Mohammad Afroz Abdul Razzak, who
came to Mumbai from London by air in late September, happened to be
kept under special watch, and when they found that this man had
changed his hotels four times in as many days, they thought of taking
him in for questioning. What Razzak had to tell them was truly
sensational, indeed bizarre.

That he was a member
of a team which had been given the task of ramming aircrafts into four
selected targets, the Parliament buildings in London and Delhi and the
Romal Tower in Australia; that he had undergone training for flying
these planes in schools in Melbourne, Texas and London on the strength
of forged educational certificates; that he was financed by the Al-Qaida
network; that these suicide attacks were to take place either at the
same time as the ones in America or a day or two later, but the plan
had misfired. He was based in London, but had taken a flight to Mumbai
to escape the British police.

Early in December
Razzak was produced before a Mumbai court, duly charged, among other
offences, with waging war against the nation.

Sensational, no
doubt; but does it ring true? Is Razzak a psychological freak
indulging in nightmarish fantasies? Is it all a hoax, pandering to the
fear of such attacks?

Or are the Mumbai
police keeping some vital details under wraps while they’re building
up their case? No doubt the true story — or at least a more credible
one — will come out when the hearings begin. But the point here is
not whether Razzak is a firebrand terrorist so much as whether the
Mumbai police would have been as vigilant, or would have acted as they
did — pull in someone for questioning merely because he had changed
his hotels frequently — before September 11.

Police surveillance
of foreigners was much more relaxed in those days, and an instance of
pulling in a foreign national for interrogation a rare occurrence.
There were risks involved, of inviting rebukes from the judiciary,
howls from human rights activists, even diplomatic protests from
oversensitive nations. Law-enforcement authorities of most civilised
nations chose to tread warily. In India, most probably, and in the
United States certainly, someone like Razzak could have gone about
beavering away at his plans without fear of arrest, no matter if he
changed hotels every day.

This assumption is
entirely demonstrable; because something very like Razzak’s case had
actually happened in the US only a month or so before that Black
Tuesday, and while the local police were convinced that they had
sufficient grounds for arresting a man, the FBI which, presumably has
a monitoring role in such extra-judicial arrests, had dug in their
toes and said ‘no’.

The proprietor of a
flying school in Minnesota was perplexed by an unusual request by a
man who wanted to enroll as one of his students. He only wanted to
learn how to steer a jetliner, but not how to take off or land.

The student’s name
was Zakarias Moussaoui, and his papers said that he was 37 years old
and that he had come from Morocco. And when the flying school owner
told Moussaoui that, even if all he wanted to learn was how to steer
the plane, he would have to pay the fees for the full course, $ 8000,
he answered: "But of course; I’ll pay the full fee — and in
cash too."

And this, more than
anything else, was so unusual in the proprietor’s experience,
because in the US, where even daily household purchase is done through
credit cards and, if only out of fear of being mugged, it is most
unusual for people to carry more than a few dollars in cash, that he
reported the matter to the police.

The FBI’s initial
inquiries seemed to warrant further questioning of the applicant for
flying training, so, much as the Mumbai police had done in the case of
Razzak, the Minnesota Police arrested Moussaoui and questioned him,
and they also made inquiries from the Moroccan police authorities. It
came out that Moussaoui had been in contact with Islamic extremists
and also that before coming to America, he had travelled to Pakistan,
and possibly to Afghanistan. But they had also discovered that this
suspect kept all his records on a personal computer in his room. The
police believed that if they could lay their hands on his computer
they would get a much clearer idea of his background and plans.

But for breaking into
the man’s room and studying his computer records, they needed the
sanction of the authorities at FBI headquarters.

Their request was
unceremoniously turned down. The police had no right to inspect anyone’s
computer records merely on suspicion. After all this man Moussaoui had
not committed a crime, had he?

This happened in
August 2001, barely a month before the destruction of the World Trade
Center. In those days, a citizen’s rights were regarded as being
more important than concerns of national security.

P.S. On December 11 Zakarias
Moussaoumi was charged with committing a whole range of terrorist
offences. He became the first person first to be charged with the
September 11 attacks.